Why would anyone stop using those standards? You seem very confused about the incentives for adopting standards. Sure, maybe US-driven standards were chosen over other possibilities partly because of political environment, but once you have a perfectly good standard adopted you’re not just going to throw it out because the original author isn’t cool anymore. You don’t need a dominant power to adopt standards.

And for being “slightly political” and “focused on the standards,” your post sure does spend the majority of its time talking about only politics and not about standards at all

Well, part of the point of NixOS is to eliminate that whole issue of forgotten tinkering – the whole system is defined right there in a few modules, or even one file, and there’s no way for un-tracked tinkering to exist outside those files.

But can I ask how you use your computer? What goes into these months of prep? I really can’t imagine it.

Lambda is certainly an interesting case for this, I’ll give you that. Outside of that, though, the impact on deployment speed is also not relevant; the bottlenecks for deployment are things like CI, canarying, even rolling blackout windows across AZs, etc. The actual time spent transmitting your build artifact over the network is completely negligible even at huge sizes

The size of the code is mostly irrelevant if you’re not shipping it to clients over the network on every request. Short of truly gargantuan statically-linked binaries in compiled languages, anyway, and bundling isn’t really an applicable concept there. And similarly, the overhead of loading modules from the filesystem is a one-time cost that’s mostly irrelevant for server-side code that runs for days or weeks or years at a time.

On the other hand, the complexity overhead of adding the additional bundling step is a major drag on development productivity, debuggability, etc.

There are “off the shelf” systems, for a sufficiently broad interpretation of “off the shelf.” But they are not cheap (requiring probably a dedicated team just to properly configure and maintain, and probably also requiring significant rearchitecturing of your application’s data), and are usually still quite shitty even after all that.

Search is just very, very hard. Much harder than even experienced devs who have not worked in the area appreciate.

Source: I am a dev on a major search engine. No, not that one, but one you have definitely used many times.